Thursday, March 15, 2007

The Frog Princess

The Walt Disney Co. has started production on an animated musical fairy tale called "The Frog Princess," which will be set in New Orleans and feature the Walt Disney Studio's first black princess.

The company unveiled the plans at its annual shareholders' meeting in New Orleans.

John Lasseter, chief creative officer for Disney and the Disney-owned unit Pixar Animation Studios, said the movie would return to the classic hand-drawn animation process, instead of using computer animation that has become the industry standard. He called the film "an American fairy tale."

We're big Pixar fans out our house, but through introducing Georgia to the classics we've rediscovered our love for the cell-animated masterpieces that made Disney great, from Snow White and Cinderella through to the renewed vigor of the nineties with The Little Mermaid, Beauty & the Beast, and so on. The fact that in their upcoming pisstake on the fairy tale princess genre Disney had to subcontract the brief 2D animated opening to an outside firm, having fired all their own animators, was a real disappointment. The announcement that Lasseter is bringing Disney back to what made them in the first place is incredibly heartening.

Yea for John Lasseter. As disappointed as I was at Disney's merger/takeover of Pixar, I find this a good sign. Classic full cel animation should never be eliminated at Disney, it's been the root of its success since the first Oswald the Lucky Rabbit and Alice films.

I was really worried about the merger when it was first announced, but when they named Lasseter as Chief Creative Officer, and he shit-canned the non-Pixar Toy Story 3, I knew it was going to work out nicely.